


full confession (but play it back)

by Star_on_a_Staff



Category: Katana ZERO (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Injury, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Combat, Death, Gen, Heavy Angst, I cried fighting Headhunter and you should too, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Time Loop, Violence, Weapons, duel, firearms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25066402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_on_a_Staff/pseuds/Star_on_a_Staff
Summary: How long do two soldiers with Chronos fight?He kills her a hundred times. She kills him a hundred times.They never go down easily.
Relationships: Zero (Katana Zero) & Headhunter (Katana Zero)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	full confession (but play it back)

**Author's Note:**

> The first time I fought Headhunter, it took me a goddamn hour. Just recently, I beat her  
> [within 30 seconds](https://twitter.com/clairvoyancehsu/status/1278822429280763905?s=20).
> 
> If that was fucked up for ME, how did these two feel??
> 
> This is me just trying to get a feel for writing Katana Zero and piling on more angst where there's already an abundance. Enjoy.

How long do two soldiers with Chronos fight?

Every week feels like a year; every conversation is spun into a minute, dragged for a month, screamed like a second. What does it feel like, to be thrust into a dance where the music of steel against gunpowder never ends? They fight over nothing, and yet they’ve surpassed the gods. 

He kills her a hundred times. She kills him a hundred times. 

They never go down easily.

O.O

Speaking is irrelevant after the first two dozen battles. He’s exhausted every one of their too-long conversations; no matter how he threatens, questions, begs, she replies with apathy, anger, and despair, respectively, so they end up clashing no matter what they say or not. 

The exterior of the vault is silent, but every time her voice breaks and snaps like fraying rope, it echoes louder than any of her concussive grenades. His own voice terrifies him in this space; the walls throw his tired, dulled cadence around and around until all he can hear are screams. 

So they shut up, and they fight.

They’ve never been good at talking anyway. 

O.O

It takes him a dozen tries to get past the irrevocable beam of her rifle. He learns to listen for the telltale high-pitched whine, to smell the split millisecond of smoke when everything charges and concentrates into a ray that promptly blows him into a million pieces until it no longer does. 

Sometimes, she changes things up with the grenade launcher, and he has to break himself out of the habit of dodging and rolling straight into a cluster of explosives that latch onto him and detonate with a skull-shattering _BANG_. 

He learns to watch, and to duck, and to dodge, and to roll, and to deflect. Her patterns become predictable, simple, like clockwork. He lunges for her at any opportunity he can; her eyes become his target; dull, slate-grey eyes that burn hot with exhaustion and desperation. They mirror his own, which makes things easier. 

He no longer dies in the first five seconds. They move on. 

O.O

When he draws first blood, it's never the same. 

Sometimes he catches her on the tail end of a desperate, upward strike. Sometimes it’s a downward plunge from on high, and sometimes, more rarely, it’s just a lucky blow that only manages to find purchase because of his precognition. Eventually, after a hundred rounds of this, it's a quick and efficient cut to the torso, like it should be.

It’s never a clean cut. The sword shudders and skips against her flesh, because she wrenches away at the last moment with a grunt of pain and disappears in a cloud of smoke and fire. 

He’s always thrown to the floor by her escape. He learns to get to his feet as quickly as he can, because otherwise the machine guns sprout from the wall and shear him in half. 

But, they are just machines, even more predictable than a low ranking NULL soldier. He cuts through them easily enough. 

O.O

The knife she wields is the only CQC weapon in her entire arsenal. She only takes it out when he breaks past her ranged defense, but he underestimates her ability to flourish it like an extension of herself and deflect the heady blows of his much longer katana. 

But she knows that with his superior strength, she won’t last long in close quarter combat with him. 

So she vanishes in a _POOF_ of explosives, and he coughs on her dust. 

  
  


O.O

She blinks, and he learns to not watch. 

The first time he saw her blinking, he failed to focus on the real and focused on the ephemeral, the afterimage, and that’s how he dies for the hundredth time by the beam of her laser rifle. 

But when he learns to grit his teeth and wait, like the patient man he never was, even her unnatural flickering can’t save her from the unflinching steel of the katana that he plunges into her side. 

The second blow is always surer. Her cry of agony is louder. 

He feels satisfaction for a grand total of a split second before she lights all the charges wrapped around her torso and rushes him.

They both die in a blaze of glory.

O.O

  
  


The knife clatters to the ground after he strikes her for the second time. 

It glitters from the ground invitingly, and he only notices after she’s charged him far too many times to count. It's almost embarrassing, really. 

So, when she lights all the charges yet again and sprints towards him with an expression of wild, manic desperation in her eyes, he hurls the knife at where the ignition sparks flicker like stars. 

The charges explode. Her bandana and mask fly off. 

Everything goes white.

O.O

Her death is cruel, because it cannot be any other way. 

She drags herself towards him, blood streaking the floor with every sick slide of her torn flesh against the metal grates. Her ragged breaths fill the hollow silence of the chamber, every inhale and exhale slowing like time. 

He stares at her face, her far too young face, as she claws towards him with slow, tortured movements. 

“Kill…” She rasps, like a hiss. 

He thinks it’s a threat. His sword peeks out from his scabbard, a glint of light in the dark chamber.

Her voice is a moan, a ragged plea. It’s thinned by screaming, and dying, and weeping. “Kill the people who did this to us…”

He pauses. Sheathes his sword as her body convulses in an all-too familiar last burst of effort. 

“For me…” She lifts out her hand, trembling. He watches it fall limply to the ground. 

He knows better than to take that hand to offer false comfort. The greatest and worst gift he can offer her is that he understands better than anyone else what it was like to be who they were; helpless gods who bent time to their pretense of a will. 

And so she dies with a last, shuddering sigh while he watches in bitter silence. 

Silence fills the chamber. What was it that V said? That Chronos makes you suffer nightmares over and over again until you die for real?

The machine guarding the vault beeps imperiously. ACCESS DENIED. RETINAL SCAN REQUIRED.

He kneels by her head. Her mouth hangs open, everything but her open eyes giving off the cruel pantomime of sleep. He draws his blade and beheads her. 

Zero wonders if this is the last time she died by his hand. He hopes for her sake—and his—that it is. 

.

.

.

fin

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> they all deserved better. 
> 
> Scream about Katana Zero with me on Twitter please. https://twitter.com/clairvoyancehsu


End file.
